Precise Pre'cis

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The other day Supratim sent me this wonderful Pascal Quote:

"I apologize for writing such a long letter but I didn't have time to write you a short one"

How true!

My Guru SDM used to take days to write Abstracts of his Papers: polishing them, burnishing them and chiseling them, while the body of the paper itself had an inevitable natural flow that didn't take much effort or time.

Sculpture is said to be a Negative Art....take a stone and just chisel away the unwanted parts!

Likewise pre'cis writing is a negative enterprise.

My most-cited Paper in AJP which that wordsmith Edwin Taylor termed: Flickering Bulb Paradox took an entire decade to formulate. Once formulated, the calculation took a couple of hours, the writing of the Body of the Paper took a day, but the Abstract took a week.

Now that I have posted about 500 Pieces on my blogspot, I think I can talk about the technology involved in the daily blogging of Light Pieces.

Unlike a seriously thought-out dissertation that has a logical sequence carrying the author and reader along, a light easy-to-read Piece is tough to write.

To keep the reader interest alive despite lack of a coherent story line or a logical sequence, one has to take recourse to mild verbal or syntactic surprises in every third sentence.

And elaborate on trivia while inserting quietly a semi-serious notion.

And humor is a tricky business. If one is not crafty and careful, he is likely to step on the corns of someone or the other: quite an embarrassingly painful situation.

And of course reader-time is of the essence and whatever one writes in a light vein has to be a precise pre'cis.




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